Unifying and renewing a divided life: bridging the divide
from Christian Concern:
As the West gradually drifts from its Christian roots, how can we reconnect society not just with a personal salvation, but an all-encompassing Christian worldview that reaches every area of life?
In part two of this new series by Joe Boot, Joe explains how the West has turned back to paganism throughout history.
Last week, we looked at the root of the divide that society has created between a personal salvation through Jesus Christ and an all-encompassing worldview of Christianity.
To really understand the problem, one must understand that in Jesus Christ – the Word in and through whom all things were created – all things hold together. As such, everything created is to be understood through that Biblical lens; all things were made through the Word and this Word is also wonderfully given along with creation.
A bridge too far
The difficulty is that the importance and power of this Biblical revelation of Christ the Word as the foundation for truly Christian thought gradually faded from view. After the apostolic era, the patristic period of the Church (the first five centuries) saw many Church Fathers that were converted from pagan backgrounds in the Greco-Roman world and they naturally brought with them the intellectual baggage of their former lives.
As brilliant as their contribution to the spread of the faith and growth of the church was, a truly inner reformation of thought in terms of a scriptural worldview did not emerge in this period. They frequently struggled to wrestle free from the powerful religious ground-motives and ideas that shaped their cultural milieu. In their sincere attempts to interpret Scripture and relate the Christian gospel to the pagan world, they were not able to successfully shake off various anti-scriptural elements of Greek thought in conveying Biblical truth. The extent of their lack of critical reflection on the implications of a fully scriptural view of reality (as being essentially antithetical to Greek metaphysics) led some of them to regard Plato himself as a proto-Christian preparing the way for the gospel! This makes most of them unreliable guides today in areas like creation, marriage, sexuality and the value of the ‘material’ world, because even men as great as Augustine were deeply influenced by Neo-Platonism.
Please right-click links to open in a new window.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
